In some environments, data is shared across many applications and/or devices. To accomplish the data sharing, data is replicated to many servers which distribute the data across the environment. For example, in some instances data is localized close to clients accessing the data in order to assure that a copy of the data is more likely to be available if failures cause one or two of the servers to become unavailable.
In accordance with some environments, a few of the servers maintain master copies of the data, while a larger number of other distributed servers contain read-only replica copies of the data. The data replication paths between these servers may be loosely coupled, such that if server failures occur, a replica data server contacts an alternate or backup server to synchronize updates of the data at the replica server. However, in some instances, a replica data server attempting to synchronize with an alternate server may discover that the replica data server stores a more recent copy of the data than is available on the alternate server. This situation can occur when the replica data server received updates from the master data server before the alternate data server received updates.